Wednesday, January 24, 2007

To help teach my kids about the world around them I implemented a trick for teaching basic geography.

I scrounged around for the maps occasionally included as inserts in National Geographic Magazine and put them up, one at a time, on a conspicuous place in the kitchen. I wrote questions on index cards and taped them up around the map for the children to solve.

For example, this month we've got a map of the Balkans up so I have "Where is Budapest?" and "Where is Montenegro?" stuck around it.

When a child can answer all the questions they show me their answers and are eligible for a treat from The Bag. Sometimes it's a few M&Ms, sometimes it's a fancy pencil, whatever I happen to have on hand.

A good place to find maps is in the discard piles at your local library. They're always getting rid of old magazines, just make sure they're current.

For some other fun links to maps try these:Middle Earth, an interactive map of Tolkien's world with zooms similar to Google EarthTrove Maps, a site where you can make your own treasure mapsPediaX, a map that allows you to find the twenty top Wikipedia entries for each locationBible Map, a site that allows you to see a map of each geographical location in the Bible indexed by the verse where it is referencedMapsack, which maps beaches, temples, ruins, castles and other cultural sitesNapoleon Dynamite's Sweet Map of Preston, Idaho, where you can seen scenes of the movie and where they were filmed. Sweet!

And don't forget Google Maps Mania which has the latest news on maps and Mapshark, which is a custom search engine for the best online maps.

I know the students I work with have the hardest time remembering the names of places and distinguishing between cities, states, and countries. This sounds like something I could work with to modify it for them.

We even did this when the younger kids couldn't read. David wanted to participate--that sibling rivalry is a powerful tool I often exploit :)--so I made sure I wrote the city/lake/location EXACTLY as it appeared on the map, such as in all caps or in a script or with a capital city star in front of it. That way he could visually match the words even if he couldn't read the word.

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